Executive Director's Monthly Message

Farm Bureau Working for You

by Eric Larson

Each month in this newsletter we publish a short list - usually six or seven items - we call Farm Bureau Working for You.  While volunteers and staff do important work for our members every day, only select items that would seem broadly interesting make the list.  Besides, a list of more than twenty items that included the mundane wouldn’t make very good reading.  Also, we don’t include on the list the things we do for individual members such as helping them navigate a permit maze, get a fee waived, understand a labor law, deal with an insurance issue, or interface with a regulatory agency.  Publishing the Monday Update, writing a newsletter, responding to media calls, and fifteen to twenty of the meetings we attend each month don’t make the list either. 

By now you are wondering why this inventory of what Farm Bureau does is the lead for this column.  Well, we took a couple of vociferous complaint calls recently from growers, one a member and one a non-member, that I’ll paraphrase as “Farm Bureau doesn’t do anything for me.”  When members talk, we listen.  When non-members talk, we listen as well because we know fewer than half of the producers in this county have decided Farm Bureau is worthy of membership.  We know what we are doing.  Maybe we are just doing a poor job of telling the farm community.

There is another aspect of this challenge; we can’t prove the negative.  For instance, what would transpire if there was no farm presence at the table with the County on habitat planning and revising the General Plan?  What if no one was reviewing every piece of state and federal legislation that impacted agriculture?  What if no one was speaking on behalf of growers on pest exclusion?  Plenty of things we dislike are happening, but imagine what it would be like if agencies and legislators heard nothing from the farm community.  When bad legislation doesn’t happen or a decision goes our way simply because we are in the room, there is no sound.

So it seems that tooting our own horn is in order.  Better yet, if all our members became tooters (that doesn’t sound so good, but I think you know what I mean) the message will be heard by fellow members and prospective members alike.  Farm Bureau Working for You needs to ring true with everyone in the farm community.